


Someone Will Remember Us

by bloominglilytrees



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cosmic Horrors, Dreamscapes, Extra Treat, Loss of Humanity, Ritual Magic, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 19:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16414724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloominglilytrees/pseuds/bloominglilytrees
Summary: Mara walked in dreams.





	Someone Will Remember Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



Mara walked in dreams.

The ether pressed around her like mist. Like smog. When she lifted her hand, a faint light, like the glow of a candle, trailed behind, its edges wispy and undefined before disappearing entirely. Her thoughts, too, trailed behind her, coming to her mind moments after she had begun to think. 

In the far reaches of her vision, something twisted.

Mara came back to herself all at once. Never had clarity been so intense, or so painful. Every detail of her surroundings stood out to her, sharply defined. The thick black lines of the ritual ink scrawled over the wooden panels of the floor. The places where the wood had grown thin from generations of students, pacing anxiously. The spines of the books gathered on the far side of the room, and what each printed word said. 

The spot on the edge of one of them where a previous owner had let the binding tear. The bed. The scratches marrings its posts. The rumpled bed sheets. The smell of someone’s perfume and skin, soaking in the place where they slept. The lace curtains over the window, slightly yellowed in a way they usually passed off as ivory. 

The stress lines under Antona’s intent, blue-grey eyes staring back at her, expectant and waiting. Her breath. The fall of her robe. The run in one of her seams. Her hands, clenched over her knees, just outside the ritual circle. The mole beneath one of her knuckles. The ink caught in the grooves of her skin. The grooves of her skin.

The thin smoke of the candles standing around the ritual circle, mixing together with the scent of vanilla and wild rose. The drip of wax. The heat. The buzzing and chirping of night insects, somewhere beyond the thick, glass window-panes. Someone giggling in a nearby room.

All of this, all at once. Mara took a shuddering breath and pressed her eyes closed. Too much, it was all too much—and still, her heart raced in exultation. 

Finally, they had done it.

* * *

Antona studied Rituals. Mara, ostensibly, studied Shaping; at the very least, that was what was written on her career path and that was what influenced the courses she took and determined which books she was allowed to take out from the libraries. They’d come together when partway through their first year, after Antona lost her original roommate and the university decided to reassign them both to a room together. Apartments in the city below might have had more space, but only those who lived within the hallowed halls of the university had access to its libraries and spell nooks at all hours, even after the gates were closed for the evening, and so living space was always high in demand. 

Mara had been among the unlucky numbers of those unlucky numbers forced to live in one of the off-ground apartments, and she’d hated the tricks her mischievous, Transmutation-path roommate liked playing on her almost as much as she’d hated the sight of the gates closing behind her each evening, locking her away from the library and all of its secrets. So when Antona's roommate was expelled and Mara’s name came up next on the list of those waiting for a room within the university, she would have jumped at the opportunity in any case. 

But the circumstances around Antona’s roommate’s expulsion intrigued Mara. Whispers abounded about dark secrets, claiming that she had done something impossible, or forbidden, but no one seemed to know anything concrete. The official position was that she had been expelled for cheating, but few people believed it, least of all Mara. Cheating was a mundane, usual. You walked down the corridor and saw an ex-student clearing out their room, their faces downcast or turned away in shame. 

Cheaters didn’t vanish overnight, their rooms emptied as though they had never existed. 

And when it turned out that Antona was intrigued too, and could remember some of the strange books she had seen her old roommate reading and had noticed some decidedly odd patterns drawn within her ritual circles—when it turned out that they, in fact, made a team like no other, their strengths and weaknesses complementing that of the other and their interests entwined—well. Well. 

The Divination path was a tricky, foggy, uncertain one; very few chose it. Mara had never even considered it. Even so—a part of her couldn’t help but think that she and Antona coming together as they had must have been fate. 

Both of them loved magic, _all_ magic. But though most magic came easily to her, Mara had no skill at rituals. She was too active, too eager and hungry. She could shape the world at her command, pull pure magic out from the ether and shape it at her command, but she could not find the calm needed for a proper ritual, could not fall in the rhythm of the ritual magic, could not lose herself in it and follow the ebb and sway of its magic as she must. 

Antona had skill in little else. She had a talent for the understated. For the small things, the details. Even her professors, used to searching for those with such talents, had her slip beneath their radar, something which she and Mara used to their advantage. 

That was where her original roommate had failed, they figured. _She_ had been acknowledged as brilliant in the field of Rituals, and where brilliance burned brightly, there were always eyes watching. For Antona, accounted as utterly average—well, she was watched for a time too, of course, simply on account of her proximity to Nadia, the expelled student, but as time passed by and she did nothing noteworthy or suspicious, those eyes gradually slipped away. 

Another trait they shared: they were patient. Oh, sometimes Mara’s eagerness twisted within her gut, gnawing at her insides until she felt as though she would scream at their inactivity, at their lack of process, but she knew how to conquer it. Or, rather, how to whisper promises to it, to soothe that hunger with words of _not now, but soon_ and dreams of what the future might hold. She walked around the world with a smile even when she felt she would burst. She knew how to wait.

And they did wait. For three years, they waited. In that time, they slowly gathered information, seeking out the books and scrolls they needed, careful, always careful, not to act too quickly or appear too keen. 

For three years, they waited. For three years, they prepared. 

But now, the waiting had finally ended.

* * *

“Tell me,” Antona breathed.

They sat together on her bed, huddled close. Their heads bent together; one blanket draped over both of their shoulders. That intense clarity had faded, finally, and now it was time to talk. 

Mara tried to describe what the dreamscape had felt like, what it had felt like to walk through there, and what it had felt like after, when she had first opened her eyes, but her words came out tangled and confused. Antona tried to follow, her forehead creased in concentration, but of course she couldn’t. Mara could feel it—how each word coming out of her mouth was somehow _wrong_ —but she didn’t know how else to describe it. 

No wonder so many of the books and scrolls they’d found had been so vague. 

“But what _was_ it?” 

_Everything_ , she wanted to say, but no. That would be inaccurate, though it had felt that way, after. She pushed aside her poetic impulses. 

“Magic—pure magic, I think. Untouched by anything, and so much of it that you could get drunk on it. I don’t know what the limits are. I don’t know if there _are_ limits.”

She’d started slowly, but by the time she reached the end, the words were flowing out of her in a rush as all the endless possibilities began spiralling in her thoughts. And when Antona’s eyes met hers, she could see her own excitement reflected within them.

* * *

From that day on, Mara began entering the dreamscape regularly. Not every day, of course—the traces ritual magic left behind were subtler than that of most other branches of magic, but it did still leave a trace, and working great rituals in their every day would eventually draw unwanted attention—but at least once every week they sat down together to send Mara’s mind out beyond the limits of human understanding. 

The clarity which greeted her awakening increased each time, which she wouldn’t have thought possible, but fortunately her capacity to comprehend it all increased as well. 

As the months went by, ether-glow began to infuse her eyes. The scrolls had warned her of that side-effect, fortunately, and she had taken the time to study the advanced Transmutation magic needed to hide the effect. It had been difficult to learn, but she’d known immediately upon reading about it that only Transfiguration or Illusions could hide such a thing, and Illusions always left such a taint behind that anyone with the least bit of magic sense could feel it if someone wore even the simplest of cosmetic charms. So Transfiguration magic it had to be. 

Actually checking out the needed books from the libraries had also been tricky, as normally all books dealing with specialized magic were restricted to students on that career path, but she had kept up the facade of a fairly affectionate friendship with her first roommate for that reason. It had been relatively simple to encourage her to check out the books she needed without her realizing that was what she was doin, and simpler still to whisk them away when she wasn’t looking and put them back when she was finished. Tanya was always losing things in her mess and finding them again anyway, so it hadn’t drawn much suspicion.

The ether-glow came back, of course, the speed of its growth increasing more and more with each visit to the dreamscape. They measured it, both the speed and the intensity, tracking it in Antona’s charts before transfiguring it away again.

Or, rather, transfiguring it out of sight. As far as they knew, nothing could actually truly _remove_ the ether-glow; all they could do was change the human perception of how it appeared. Mara could still feel it, both the pressure and the power, lingering behind her eyes.

Antona couldn’t feel it at all. They tested it thoroughly, taking advantage of her particularly sensitive magic sense, but though both knew it was there, and though both knew that it was ether, that thing from which all magic was born, to her, it felt as though there was no magic there at all.

* * *

“Why don’t you come with me?”

Mara asked the question abruptly. They both sat at their desks, studying—for once—for their actual schoolwork, but sometime between reading a section of a discourse on whether the shaping of objects to create nutritional value was truly possible or just a fairy tale and setting her pen to paper to scrawl out the first few sentences of her analysis of that discourse, she found herself opening her mouth and the words spilling out.

In some ways, the question was unexpected. In others, it was not.

From the moment they first began to comprehend just what this venture entailed it had been understood, somehow, that it would be Mara entering the dreamscape as Antona facilitated it with her ritual. Mara would be active; Antona would be passive. But now, the further Mara explored the dreamscape, the more she became enraptured with its magic, the less she liked leaving Antona behind. It made her uneasy, in a way she couldn’t name. 

They were partners in all things. They should be partners in this as well.

She turned to look at Antona.

“You know it’s risky, being both ritual participant and ritual-bearer,” said Antona mildly, still facing her desk. “Likely, that’s how Nadia got caught.”

Mara brushed that aside with a wave of her hand. “She got caught because she was impetuous, impatient, and foolish.” 

“And untrusting,” said Antona, not quite disagreeing. She sighed, then. “I wish to study it. Not see it, necessarily, though I suppose it would be interesting in its own way. Besides. It’s clear that visiting this realm leaves behind lingering effects. See the ether-glow, for instance. It would be sensible for one of us to remain as a control. And,” she added, apparently foreseeing Mara’s next argument, “it is not as though I am sacrificing my own pleasure for the sake of yours. I do enjoy the casting of the ritual. It’s challenging, in a way rituals rarely are. To stay focused, and fall into the magic at the same time...”

“It would be more challenging still to do so as a participant in the ritual,” said Mara slyly.

Without a word, Antona reached over to her bed, picked up a pillow, and threw it at her.

With a startled laugh, Mara ducked her head, allowing the pillow to strike the wall and fall harmlessly down onto the surface of her desk. She could take a hint. The conversation, then, was over.

Still. As she turned back to her schoolwork, a quiet fear lingered in her heart.

* * *

Mara wandered in the dreams. Light streamed out after her like the trail of a restless spirit. That light had grown, since her first visit: the glow of candle transformed into a wildfire. She drifted, letting the magic take her where it will.

Eternity hovered at the horizon. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched it. It had been a long time since a glimpse had been enough to throw her out from the dreamscape, though she could not quite yet look upon it at her leisure.

 _Soon_ , something whispered. Something inside of her, but not her. _Soon_. 

That twisting void, turning—

Mara woke to the now-familiar clarity, letting the pain pass her by. She scarcely noted it anymore. Instead, she looked around the room, listening, trying to see what new details would be revealed to her. 

But this time, what she saw was completely unexpected—something she had never seen before. Something that wasn’t even there. Antona kneeled before her, but the shadow of Antona slept in her bed, and kneeling near where Antona kneeled was another shadow. Another woman. 

Mara had never seen her in the flesh before, but she knew who she must be. It was Nadia. 

“I can see her. Nadia.”

“What?” Antona asked, clearly startled, but Mara didn’t answer, too focused on the shadow’s movements. She was drawing something, silver lines glimmering into existence with each movement of her hand. Fascinated, Mara watched the ritual circle form. It looked much like theirs, but what were those scribbles at the edge?

Finished, the shadow of Nadia stood. At first Mara, still studying the ritual circle, didn’t pay much attention. Not until she drew a potion vial out from her pocket and began to approach the shadow of Antona sleeping in bed. She leaned over and tilted Antona’s head back, and with horror Mara watched as she pushed her mouth open and forced the contents of the vial down her throat.

Antona’s face, peaceful with sleep, slackened, as though she had fallen into herself.

“She _drugged_ you!”

Never had she switched so quickly between academic interest and incinerating rage.

“Mara?”

Her fury should have blinded her, but instead it made everything sharper. Mara could _see_ ancient streams of magic hanging in the air: the ghosts of centuries upon centuries of Shaping and Divination and Illusions and Transmutation and Ward-Weaving and spell-making from countless other fields of magic cast in this room, and threaded between them all, between the sweet taste of Antona’s rituals and the acrid burning of her own dabbling in more fields than she was allowed she could see the gleam of Nadia’s magic. She could see the trail, and she wanted nothing more than to hunt Nadia down, even if it took her across dimensions. She wanted to wrap her tendrils around her, to make her suffocate in her magic, to make her pay. 

“Calm down.” Antona’s hands reached out to her, breaking through the threaded strands of magic between them to touch her skin. “We knew that already, remember? It was the only logical explanation for how I could have slept through a ritual of that magnitude being performed so near to me.”

“I know. I know. But that’s different. This time, I _saw_ it.” She scarcely knew what she was saying. A more distant part of her, the patient part, knew: she could not frighten Antona. Time was at her disposal; Nadia could wait. What mattered was Antona. She had to calm down. 

She forced her fury down, whispering promises to it. _Later. Later_. 

When she was sure again had control of herself, she opened eyes that she didn’t remember closing and looked to Antona, who, she saw, gripped her hands tightly in her own.

The clarity had faded again. As always, Mara mourned the loss. Everything always felt fuzzier in the aftermath—not in the way of the dreamscape, but in the manner of simple human forgetfulness. She remembered the shadows, and she remembered the ghosts of ancient magic hanging in the air—the shock of which was only now beginning to settle in with its true impact—but everything else seemed a little distant, somehow. Even the memory of the precise thoughts which had run through her mind seemed to have been wiped clean in the process of calming down. 

“Your eyes,” Antona said before Mara could speak. She seemed to be aiming for a reflective tone, but didn’t quite manage it. Her fingers trembled around Mara’s hands. “When you first came back. The ether-glow overwhelmed them. All I could see was white. But it seems to have settled down, now.”

Mara frowned. “ _Settled down_? But the ether-glow doesn’t change—not unless I transmute it.”

Something about her agitation seemed to soothe whatever ailed Antona. She said, “I know. But I couldn’t see the features of your eyes earlier, and now I can. Those are the facts we have.”

“Right. We’ll need to make note of it—see if it happens again and figure out why, if so. But more importantly—” She couldn’t hold it in anymore. Twisting her grip so that her fingers entwined with Antona’s, she said, “Antona, Antona. I could _see_ it. All the magic that’s ever been cast in this room, across all the centuries.”

Antona inhaled sharply. Only active magic could be sensed—she knew that as well as Mara did. For someone to become able to sense magic that had already passed on… Neither were the sort to whine about the impossibility of things, and so, the implications overwhelmed. In the area of crime alone— 

“This could change the whole justice system, if used,” Antona whispered, echoing Mara’s own thoughts. “But—this ritual is _ancient_. People used to study it, here, at this university, before the texts were destroyed! If it can do _this_ , then why doesn’t anyone _use_ it?”

“Fear,” said Mara tightly. She meant the usual human fear of the unknown and the powerful, but as she said it she realized that she, too, was afraid. Her fear twisted through her veins, undefined and terrible, as if her very blood cringed away from the power at her grasp. 

Stupid. But she supposed that even she couldn’t go beyond human frailties. 

“Still,” said Antona vehemently, and that was how Mara knew this truly angered her: she rarely raised her voice. “The _waste_ of it all. It’s disgusting.”

“I agree.”

Antona held onto her anger a moment longer, and then that mulish look faded. “I suppose raging about it will do little good. But there was another matter.” She hesitated. “You mentioned seeing Nadia.”

Upon hearing the name, something within Mara surged violently. She bit back on it just in time, though it left her a little breathless as she said, “Yes.”

“How? And in what matter? Was it truly her, or—?”

Mara thought back. “It wasn’t her as she would be now, if that is what you mean. It was a memory.” It was a little difficult to remember, but… “I think it was a part of the ghost of the ritual she was casting. The other magic I saw didn’t have shadows attached, I think, but for some reason, that one did.”

“Perhaps because she cast the same ritual as the one which gives this extra sense, it recorded more of her then the rest?” Antona frowned. “That doesn’t sound quite right, but without more information, we can’t say more.”

“No. We can’t.” It came out sharper than she meant it too, though she didn’t know why. When Antona threw her a startled look, she rubbed her forehead and sighed. “Sorry. I’m just tired. Let’s just get our tests done so we can go to bed, alright?”

* * *

Her anger with Nadia never faded. It stayed with her, always simmering beneath the surface. Vaguely, she knew that that was strange: she’d never before been the type to hold a grudge, preferring instead to focus on the magic she could learn rather the misdeeds others had done to her. 

Perhaps it was because it wasn’t she who Nadia had harmed, but Antona. Since they had met, Antona had always been different from all others: the exception to the rule. Why not in this scenario as well?

She told herself this in those moments when her anxiety grew beyond ignoring. She told herself this over and over, until she ceased to be anxious about it at all.

* * *

“Tell me what you see,” said Antona, and Mara did, describing the taste, the smell, the feel of all the magic that had been cast in their room over the centuries until her vision faded back to human clarity.

But though she now sensed the traces of dead magic upon each of her awakenings from the dreams, never again did Antona see her eyes blaze with that white light.

* * *

One night, as they sat there scrubbing away the lines of the ritual circle with clumps of a grainy clay-like substance, Antona asked, “Are you alright?”

Mara looked up, surprised. “Me? Why wouldn’t I be alright?”

“You seem...different, lately. I can’t put my finger on why.”

Mara smiled, and, without a care for the smut covering her fingers, reached over to brush a strand of Antona’s hair out of her face.

“I’m perfectly fine. How could I not be, with all that I’ve learned together with you? Don’t worry.”

Within her, something trembled.

_Soon. Soon._

* * *

Mara drifted through dreams. She could see them now: the great beings twisting upon the horizon, they which were made of magic and gave magic in return. She knew what they were now, and she now could look upon them heedlessly and without fear. She had grown, since her first visit to this place. She had changed. She didn’t need to fear waking up any more.

She looked back at the light flowing out from behind her. So much light was there now, blazing bright. Almost a whole body’s worth. 

She didn’t need that light. She didn’t need that body, either. It was just a limitation, something that held her back, and she tore it away from her as easily as breathing. Easier, for breathing was just another limitation now. 

She tore it all away. Her spirit shifted, twisted, changed, and the agony was like none she had ever known before; the ecstasy, too, was like none she had ever felt. The universe opened up before her. Space, time—nothing more than human concepts. She was more than that now.

She tore open a rift in the fabric of existence, and what little human part of her was left laughed as she saw Nadia on the other side, kneeling in the room she shared with Antona, surrounded by the scribbles she thought would protect her. 

She reached out through the rift with her tendrils, and devoured.


End file.
